Will you listen?
So technically TED Global hasn’t begun but this morning’s first session was part 1 of 2 for TED University, a segment of the conference where “professors” have 6 minutes to give a presentation on variety of topics. The list of speakers and their presentations were incredible.
We’ve heard amazing talks and ideas already in this first hour… Some that stood out for me were -
Ian Goldin, who presented “6 Things You Need to Know about 2030″ and talked about both the perils and amazing opportunities of continues growth in technology and globalization.
Rachel Pike, who presented “What makes a climate headline”, talked about the massive amount of work that is behind even the tiniest of publications for climate research.
Jim Walker unaided by visuals gave us a great imagining of the future of power controlled by intelligent application of information technology.
Julian Treasure, who presented “Sound Affects”, talked about the physiological and psychological effects of sound.
The list goes on and on… but what I loved about their presentations is that many of them proposed a strong and viable solution to the problems they discussed. Their ideas filled me with hope about the future. So what really struck me was that our key to surviving and thriving as the human race will not be whether we can come up with solutions to problems in education, energy, climate change, globalization, etc… Many solutions are already there. The main question is: Will we collectively listen and act?
So, will you listen?
Unobtrusive technology, the iPhone & iMapMyFitness
I’m a big fan of unobtrusive technology - software, hardware sitting in the background quietly performing some profoundly useful task without blinking, beeping or generally acting like your average 3 year old doing anything to get your attention. Even in the classroom, I think less is more – smaller laptops, iPods, etc. – devices that don’t make the classroom looks like an aisle in Best Buy but make it look and function like what it’s suppose to be: a classroom. I would love to see less devices and more embedded technology like this (though I’d hardly call that “background”).
Now, because of this inclination, I love minimalist interfaces and, of course, the iPhone which has tons of very simple apps that make your life easier, better or generally more fun with very little input.
Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time on my road bike. I’ve been cycling since I was a teenager and never have I seen a sport so over techno-fied (except maybe golf). Cycling computers can report all kinds of information these days: your heart rate, speed (in a million different forms), cadence, power, elevation, grade, etc, etc…. it goes on and on. This information is absolutely critical to professional cyclists riding in the Tour de France, but I’m definitely no Lance Armstrong. I mostly enter races for fun and to have a goal to train towards. I always want to get better but for me that usually just involves getting off my butt and riding more. But of course I, like many others, just can’t help analyzing every ride to see whether I was a tiny fraction better than I was the last ride no matter how irrelevant that information actually is to my amateurish, squeeze-in-between-wife-3 kids-and-job workouts. My problem is that if I have all that information constantly being reported to me, I obsess over it and forget about enjoying the ride. But can I let go of that information? It is useful and motivating in the long run to see where you were and how far you’ve come.
Enter my trusty iPhone and the app iMapMyFitness. With this app, you press Start and put it away in your jersey pocket. You can ride, run, mountain bike wherever and however you want, and it records everything: how fast you went, what route you took, elevation gains, and all kinds of other tidbits. This way, I can just ride, enjoy the fresh air, great scenery and general burning of my lungs and legs. 
Once I get home, I hit Stop and my ride is uploaded to Mapmyfitness.com (a.k.a mapmyrun.com, mapmyride.com) and their legendary training analysis and fitness social networking service. There I can obsess about it all I want when I’m back in front of my blinking, blipping computer.
2 buttons to press, TONS of value… my kind of technology.
IT Control – Let it go already
This is a message to education IT departments and school administrators everywhere: Let the reins of IT control out a bit. Trust me, it won’t spell disaster for your environment.
I’m tired of hearing (mostly on Twitter) about amazing, progressive and innovative teachers having to do their work in spite of their school or district IT departments. IT departments should be enablers of technology use in a school, not trying to prevent it from happening.
Control, in the sense of school-wide IT policies and restrictions, really means supportability and security. The only reason these policies are really placed is that the less variables you have in a technology infrastructure the less you have to support, maintain and secure. Homogeneous is good in this sense. However, control limits freedom, which limits creativity, and in a time when the world is focusing on how to improve education, is this really what we want to be doing?
In a school setting, locking down teacher and student laptops, filtering the internet, etc. simply means you will not get the net benefit out of your technology investments. You will not see any improvement in the way teaching and learning happens. There are amazing creative teachers out there that know far more about using technology in the classroom than IT professionals.
Standards, supporting and security are definitely important so how do we strike the balance between supportability/security and freedom in a technology infrastructure? Here are a few points I’ve learned:
- IT departments must understand that a little user freedom is not the end of the world. Many colleagues are shocked at the level of freedom we give to our teachers and students at our school. But they also are shocked that we actually don’t have tons of problems caused by it.
- Cater to the user’s that need the support and give freedom to those who don’t. Have a set of applications that are official, supported and promoted but allow people to use others if they desire.
- If users constantly attempt to go around standards, perhaps the standards aren’t good enough. Solutions provided should provide enough value for people to want to use them. If not, then you need to question whether the value is there and respond accordingly.
- Use passive monitoring: If you must, monitor Internet use and applications installed and deal with abusers individually and directly instead of restricting the whole community. It probably takes less time overall than administering a tightly locked down environment.
- Instead of forcing, try convincing. It’s more effort but it’s worth it in the long run.
I am well familiar with the complexities of supporting and maintaining any IT infrastructure. Total user freedom while maintaining budget and availability is a difficult thing to achieve and many cases may not be desirable. However, we must understand the negative implications of restrictive IT policies on creativity, innovation and adaptibility, especially in an educational context.
We need to collectively let the reins out. I’ve been an IT Director in a school for the last decade. 750 students and 110 teachers all with laptops, all with full administrative rights and no Internet filtering. It is FAR from the total anarchy you might imagine. Sometimes it might be a little more work, but it’s worth the effort overall.
Design Patterns in Educational Technology
“In software engineering, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. ” – Wikipedia. This concept was a huge boon in software development. Object oriented programming was mainstream by that time and provided an incredibly scalable and effective way of building complex software. However, it also providing unlimited possibilities for approaching solving any particular problem leading many to still have to “re-invent wheel” on every project. Design patterns provided light to how to deal with design situations that are common across many different types of applications. In addition, associating well understood names with these situations now gave developers a better way to communicate. When discussing issues, instead of saying we need to “Provide a way to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation”, they simply say we need an Iterator, and generally what is needed is understood allow them to move on to the more unique aspects of the task at hand.
Thinking about this concept in relation to how technology is implemented in the curriculum, I wondered: what are some common curriculum design patterns in the application of technology in education that would provide guidance to teachers trying to improve how subjects are taught? Can we provide a common language to the different ways technology can be applied in order to simplify our conversations? Perhaps abstracting things somewhat will give teachers a better way to discuss and improve upon technology in education much the same way developers have been able to do in software design.
Here are a few that I came up with. There are many more I’m sure but think about the ways you see technology applied in the classroom. Can they fall under one of these categories or do they need a pattern of their own?
- Alternative Media for projects / assignments: Using technology to provide students with alternative ways of communicating their knowledge and understanding. Example: Instead of an essay, a short video commercial, a historical radio show, a graphical collage in Photoshop, a blog post.
- Assignment workflow: Using technology for the distribution, creation, submission, marking and returning of assignments.
- Information Front-loading information: using videos, websites, or other engaging media to ensure students enter the class with background in order to make the face-to-face discussion more worthwhile.
- Skill front-loading: Best explained with an example. Titration experiments in Chemistry take a lot of time before, during and after a class. Using titration simulations, students can do many experiments quickly to “get the feel” for the experiment before actually performing the true physical lab. With the prior understanding, they can garner more from the lap experience when they go to do it. A similar example might be using software to experiment with mixing colours before entering an painting class in Art.
- Crowd sourcing knowledge to make topics more relevant / interesting. For example, when discussing social issues, a teacher might leverage the students’ access to SMS on their cell phones or a social network to obtain “real world” statistics relevant to the topic.
- Visualization: Use of technology to allow students to visualize difficult concepts more effectively. Tools like Wordle, Efofex’s FX MathPack, and many others. would fall into this category.
- Providing Context: Using technology to provide better context to what’s being discussed. For example, when discussing Gangis Khan’s conquest in History, Google Earth might be used to give students a better perspective of the regions affected.
In the original “Design Patterns” book, the authors known as the “Gang of Four” outlined 23 patterns in software development. Now there are many more. How many “patterns” are there for applying technology to bettering education?
What’s on my mind?
New look to the blog, some new apps and sites (Twitter, Yammer and Classroom 2.0) Here’s what’s been on my mind lately:
- How do you balance innovation with standardization in a school? You want to have and encourage innovative teachers but there does need to be a common experience for students both across sections and across courses within a school.
- Cloud services – huge wave hitting IT across industries… where is it going and how will schools ultimately benefit from them?
- Google Apps For Education vs. Microsoft Live @ EDU – both are very attractive offerings for schools (especially considering the price tag). What’s the better offering? Will one win out?
- Frictionless collaboration – see this amazing post by Andy McAfee (a blog on Web 2.0 worth following) for more details
- Microblogging tools like Twitter and Yammer- how can these change / improve collaboration within an organization?
I have more questions than answers these days but hopefully over the next while I can post some thoughts and results from my ongoing research.
